The Dream Becomes a Reality

My new frame just came in. Now to order some parts from my friend Whit...

Victory is Mine!

Today I received a notification on my door that contractors will arrive on Tuesday to create a barrier wall that will divert water from running right on my porch during rainstorms.

And to think it only took six years...

Gastronomic Excellence

Tonight I cooked an absolutely delicious Chicken Breast with Chimichurri sauce. Quick, easy, and the three pounds I cooked will last me throughout the week! Next week will be Honey Mustard Turkey. Stay tuned!

Cooking

One of my goals is to cook at least once a week. Cooking is surprisingly nerve-wracking. It requires timing, preparation, and attention, three things which I tend to lack. Nevertheless, the final product is usually very rewarding to eat, although I don't think I'll ever understand the economy of taking three hours to prepare something that's eaten all to hell in thirty minutes!

This past evening my friend Bryan and I cooked a fucking awesome Porkchop-with-apples-and-cider-gravy meal, with a side of homemade oven fries and kale. Kale is a leafy green vegetable that is considered one of the healthiest things you can eat. We sauteed it with Parmesan cheese and topped it with bacon, where the healthy and unhealthy battled for dominance within our stomachs.

Overall, a most rewarding and tasty way to get progress with one of my list items!

Ruminations on Accomodations

There are a few vital, pivotal items on my list for this cycle of 1001 days; the most important one of these might be finding a new place to live. I've lived in my current place for almost six years now. In fact, it will be over six years by the time my lease expires, and I'm determined not to renew.

Over the past six years, my life has been in constant perturbation; throughout my college career, throughout several intimate relationships and several jobs, throughout happiness and depression, I have come home to the same set of rooms, with almost the same contents. As a person, I have grown vastly, and yet I find myself staring at the same surroundings night after night, week after week, year after year.

This apartment was a wonderful place for that 22 year old who was tremendously unsure about himself and his place in the world, but it's not so wonderful for who I am now. It's not that this place is bad, It's just no longer appropriate for the person I see myself becoming; it's not even appropriate for the person I feel I have been for a year or so. It's well past time that I moved on.

Like I said, it's not a bad place. I have two bedrooms, fairly low rent, and it's quiet. But it also gets little sunlight. It's dark and the ceilings are low. It has a lot of features that play into my depressive tendencies and Seasonal Affective Disorder. For some reason, I also feel that my surroundings are keeping me from moving forward.

I've got two choices: Buy or rent. I haven't figured out which of these I'll choose yet, but I do know that there's absolutely no reason why I should go for anything less than what I want. After all, I've got a year to look. I've come up with a few "nice-to-haves" for my new place. It's unlikely that I'll find a place with all of these things together, so I'm willing to compromise on a few things if it's a place that's excellent in every other way.

Features of which I am desirous vis-a-vis potential new dwelling structures:

• Hardwood or tile floors.
  
  Almost all the places I've ever lived in have had typical wall-to-wall carpet. I've come to the conclusion that carpet is ghetto-ass shit for chump ass punks (no offense, gentle reader, if you are a chump-ass punk). Carpet holds in allergens, has special stain lock-in technology, so it will never be the same after that first spill, and invariably looks like it belongs in a crackhouse a year after you buy it.
  
  Hardwood and tile are classy, last forever if you aren't a fucking ape with sandpaper for shoes, and you can let your personality shine through by placing area rugs or bear/leopard skins in strategic spots.
  
  As much as I hate carpet, this isn't a deal breaker, because I can always rip up that weak shit and at the very least plop down some almost equally-as-ghetto pergo. Although no straight player has carpet, it can be tolerated. At first.


• high(er than my current apartment, which isn't too hard) ceilings.
  
  Nothing says home-sweet-home more than having ceilings that you can touch by raising your hands above your head. That's right, my current apartment is basically a hobbit-hole from Lord of the Rings. I used to tell dates: "Come on down and see my dungeon", but "have you ever seen an apartment with ceilings like a dollhouse?" seems to work much better. It freaks them out less.
  
  After six years of living in a place that a hibernating bear would feel "cozy" in, I think it's definitely time for nice vaulted ceilings, at least in the common and entertaining rooms, because nothing squelches a good time like your guests feeling like the ceiling is pressing down on them like a trap from an Indiana Jones movie. This is, quite frankly, a requirement, heating and cooling bills be damned. I will pay the extra money because it's worth it not to feel like Shaq visiting mini-me's house when I come home at night.


• Gas Range/Stove.
  
  Because Electric stoves and ovens are so fucking shitty I don't even want to talk about it. If I wanted a pot of water to take an hour to boil, I'd just breathe on it really hard. Not a requirement but I'm really sick of having stove envy of my friends with gas ranges. Definitely a nice-to-have.


• Lots of natural light.
  
  I think this is an extension of my wish for high ceilings. My current apartment is suitable for vampires, albinos, and those weird fucking things from the movie Descent. Unfortunately, unlike the cave in Descent, my apartment is not often filled with numbers of hot spelunkers, but that's a bitch for another time.
  
  Is it too much to ask to be able to tell the difference between 12:00PM and 8:00PM when I'm at home?



• A garage.
  
  I'm male. This should be enough explanation. Plus, the CrossFit Garage Gym calls to me...



• Near to cool places.
  
  Preferably reachable on a bike. This is important to me. I hate commuting!

Is it too much to ask for all of these in one place? I hope not!

Settin' 'em up and Knockin' 'em Down!

I actually wanted to see how many single quotes I could squeeze into one subject line. Not too shabby! I've been pretty busy here. I think I should probably check in my progress a little more often than I'm doing now, but the important thing is that I remain motivated and I'm totally in it to win it!

I've officially spent a bunch of money for my Moots road frame! It took some wavering back and forth ("Man, that's a lotta money..." vs. "What a fuckin' awesome bike this will be"), but I finally plunked down the cash for the frame and titanium seatpost. Thanks so much to James from New Revolution Cycles for his friendly responses and help ensuring that I get the proper size frame. I highly recommend this shop, even though it's a little ways out of Austin, in Kyle. It's places like this that really exemplify why I like shopping at small, independent stores instead of large corporate behemoths (it's also a reason why I chose the frame I did!).

I can't wait to get back on the road. It's been way too long since I've felt the wind through my hair and the familiar burn in my legs as I climb up the hills. I've marked this item complete, even though I still have componentry (Campy Chorus) to buy and a bike to assemble, I've already done the hard part. The frame should be here Friday. I can't wait!

I've also made a wee bit of headway in my apartment situation. I came home Saturday evening to discover my bathroom ceiling partially collapsed. Apparently, the people living upstairs had taken a shower without the shower curtain. Oops. Regardless, I took the time to put in a work order not only about that, but also about the drainage problem, where every drop of rain that falls on the parking lot of my apartment complex gets redirected exactly to my front porch.

Yesterday, I spoke to the head of maintenance for my apartment complex. He assured me that they had contacted some contractors, who would apparently build a retaining wall of some sort. Truthfully, I'm not really holding my breath; The point here is not necessarily to get the wall built, but instead to continually assert my right to proper housing for which I'm paying $900 a month! For a variety of reasons, I'm not renewing my lease here, so I might as well try and make the place better for the next tenant!

I've also been working on my photography; I'm trying to take the time to go through and make pictures I'm proud of. I have even had a few successes lately in locations about which I felt a great deal of skepticism. It never hurts to try!

That's about all for now!

Finances

One of my action items is to start using Quicken for my finances. I have used it in the past, and in fact I was a really good boy for a long time. Then Quicken crashed and lost all my financial data. My backup Quicken database also crashed Quicken. I was frustrated enough to stop using the program. I wanted to get back on the wagon this year.

My sister is going to try and use an online program called Mint to keep track of her finances. I've created an account and played around with it for about an hour. I'm definitely not going to use this product. Here's why:

• No reconciliation of accounts


• No manual entry of charges that matches up with what you've spent later on


• Creepy ads that imply they're taking your financial information and comparing it against their creepy internal database to give you creepy offers about how much you could be saving


• No support for any of my investment or retirement accounts

Summary: Mint is a stupid piece of shit. I recommend that everyone who is using it STOP now, and anyone that is thinking about using it NOT DO SO. Back to Quicken for me. Even though it sucks and crashes.

Fuck you, Mint.